projectMalamute wrote:steve wrote:there are compromises made in the moment that are practical, political or emotional in nature that do not need to be indulged in the historical record. I absolutely, 100% disagree with this. From the point of view of the historical record I think we want to preserve the object as it actually was when it actually happened.I think this is an easy argument to make now that bands are essentially DIY enterprises, but historically I can think of many examples of things where I'm glad the tapes survived. Is my preference of the expanded, track phase-aligned version of Live At Leeds invalid because it wasn't the album released in 1970..

Steve is vindicated here if you look at something as well known as the recent Loveless remaster. Shields had to painstakingly splice together all of those interludes with the original final mixes of the songs (and I think a couple of redone versions). Had everything been tracked in digital back then, there wouldn't have been much of a point in doing this, as the fidelity gained now would be negligible. And aside from that, the original audio and sessions probably wouldn't be retrievable still.That's just one example.

projectMalamute wrote:steve wrote:there are compromises made in the moment that are practical, political or emotional in nature that do not need to be indulged in the historical record. I absolutely, 100% disagree with this. From the point of view of the historical record I think we want to preserve the object as it actually was when it actually happened.What "actually happened" is more than what made it into stores. Lots of things never made it that far at all. They are all important enough to save, not just the final version of the big hits, though by default those should survive too.

twelvepoint wrote:The nature of digital storage - on the enterprise scale that drives advances in business technology - is that data is never really stored and put on a cobwebby shelf somewhere. It's constantly being regularly backed up and duplicated. If a hard drive borks out, you just swap in another drive in your RAID array. If your nightly tape backup fails, destroy the cassette and pop in a new one. Excepting maybe commercially-printed CDs and punch cards, there's no digital media that's been created where the expectation is that it can sit for 20 years. Not that we aren't pleasantly surprised when that CD-R from 20 years ago works and your old stuff finally gets up on Bandcamp. Conversely, if that old CD-R is unreadable, it shouldn't be a shock. If we're gonna store digital we have to think like a business and regularly tend to it. Have a huge hard drive that you copy every year to another huge hard drive. Back up to Carbonite. Make sure Carbonite still exists once in a while. I dunno, it's not a set-it-on-a-shelf-and-forget-it deal, but it's regular data maintenance we already do (or should do) with photos, financial records, etc.Problems in blue, things nobody is doing in response in red.When a session is done, we give the band their masters. If they're analog they can put them on a shelf and in 100 years they'll be fine, we can resurrect the session completely. If they're digital, they're probably fucked.

Live at Leeds is a good example. The reissue has about an album's worth of extra material that wasn't deemed worthy during the initial release, all of which is stunning.

twelvepoint wrote:Is it reasonable to expect people to do routine maintenance of their digital stuff? I appreciate that you find it professionally responsible to sent clients home with archival-quality media, but that doesn't address the larger issue that the same lack of diligence with music file storage also applies to other personally valuable and historic stuff like photos and videos.I don't care about anything other than music, that's what I'm responsible for. The rest is all doomed too, sure, whatever. Don't care. Music, that's my deal. I care about that.Nobody in a band is going to do any of the redundant file maintenance described. They barely change their strings.

steve wrote:twelvepoint wrote:Seems like the digital archive issue - according to Steve - is twofold: First is whether sessions are stored in an organized manner so you don't have lots of little edits in an /audio folder that are dependent on a Pro Tools session to piece back together. Second is whether the archive media itself is durable. Is that a fair assessment?Those are the two issues people feel are sufficient to refute my position, but not sufficient to solve the problems.Retrievability of the session is critically important. The raw material, not just the final version. I say this because there are compromises made in the moment that are practical, political or emotional in nature that do not need to be indulged in the historical record. Part of that is the choice of material -- the important matter of recordings that were part of the session (outtakes, alternate versions, edits for length, songs that didn't make it to release) not being preserved because they aren't the end product.You never know what will acquire importance over time, so we are obliged to preserve all of it.The nature of digital storage - on the enterprise scale that drives advances in business technology - is that data is never really stored and put on a cobwebby shelf somewhere. It's constantly being regularly backed up and duplicated. If a hard drive borks out, you just swap in another drive in your RAID array. If your nightly tape backup fails, destroy the cassette and pop in a new one. Excepting maybe commercially-printed CDs and punch cards, there's no digital media that's been created where the expectation is that it can sit for 20 years. Not that we aren't pleasantly surprised when that CD-R from 20 years ago works and your old stuff finally gets up on Bandcamp. Conversely, if that old CD-R is unreadable, it shouldn't be a shock. If we're gonna store digital we have to think like a business and regularly tend to it. Have a huge hard drive that you copy every year to another huge hard drive. Back up to Carbonite. Make sure Carbonite still exists once in a while. I dunno, it's not a set-it-on-a-shelf-and-forget-it deal, but it's regular data maintenance we already do (or should do) with photos, financial records, etc.

steve wrote:twelvepoint wrote:The nature of digital storage - on the enterprise scale that drives advances in business technology - is that data is never really stored and put on a cobwebby shelf somewhere. It's constantly being regularly backed up and duplicated. If a hard drive borks out, you just swap in another drive in your RAID array. If your nightly tape backup fails, destroy the cassette and pop in a new one. Excepting maybe commercially-printed CDs and punch cards, there's no digital media that's been created where the expectation is that it can sit for 20 years. Not that we aren't pleasantly surprised when that CD-R from 20 years ago works and your old stuff finally gets up on Bandcamp. Conversely, if that old CD-R is unreadable, it shouldn't be a shock. If we're gonna store digital we have to think like a business and regularly tend to it. Have a huge hard drive that you copy every year to another huge hard drive. Back up to Carbonite. Make sure Carbonite still exists once in a while. I dunno, it's not a set-it-on-a-shelf-and-forget-it deal, but it's regular data maintenance we already do (or should do) with photos, financial records, etc.Problems in blue, things nobody is doing in response in red.When a session is done, we give the band their masters. If they're analog they can put them on a shelf and in 100 years they'll be fine, we can resurrect the session completely. If they're digital, they're probably fucked.Is it reasonable to expect people to do routine maintenance of their digital stuff? I appreciate that you find it professionally responsible to sent clients home with archival-quality media, but that doesn't address the larger issue that the same lack of diligence with music file storage also applies to other personally valuable and historic stuff like photos and videos.

Also, I wish so bad that I had isolated drum and guitar tracks on YouTube to obsess over back when I had gobs of time to practice. Must be so amazing for kids today to have that as a resource.

steve wrote:projectMalamute wrote:steve wrote:there are compromises made in the moment that are practical, political or emotional in nature that do not need to be indulged in the historical record. I absolutely, 100% disagree with this. From the point of view of the historical record I think we want to preserve the object as it actually was when it actually happened.What actually happened is more than what made it into stores. Lots of things never made it that far at all. They are all important enough to save, not just the final version of the big hits, though by default those should survive too.What's really lovely here is preserving the option to revise these aesthetic appraisals at different junctures. Perspective is an amazing thing regarding art, and preserving adjacent items to the primary work means preserving the means of a wider perspective. While some of it might not be deemed essential this is a choice in curation and is relative to purposes and contexts. Should a reissue of Pop album X be swamped with a dozen out takes? Likely not for the purposes of general listening, but there are other purposes. (Say you want to contextualize someone's playing style in a session within a greater scope; more samples make for a more informed assessment)Regarding the BBC, they had notoriously ruthless archiving methods which vastly prioritized material costs over preservation. It's shocking to read about, but it wasn't carelessness as much as a dedicated policy for recycling film and tape.